Agricultural operations such as fruit harvesting traditionally involve intensive manual labor. Nevertheless, various solutions for automating these operations have been proposed. For example, Sarig provides a review of several fruit-picking robotics solutions, in “Robotics of Fruit Harvesting: A State-of-the-art Review,” Journal of Agricultural Engineering Research, volume 54, 1993, which is incorporated herein by reference. U.S. Pat. No. 3,646,741, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, describes a crop harvesting apparatus that is particularly suited for picking of tree-borne crops such as fruit and nuts.
Peterson et al. describe a robotic bulk apple harvester, in “A Systems Approach to Robotic Bulk Harvesting of Apples,” Transactions of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers, volume 42, issue 4, 1999, which is incorporated herein by reference. PCT International Publication WO 2006/063314, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, describes an agricultural robot system for harvesting, pruning, culling, weeding, measuring and managing of agricultural crops.
Beaten et al. describe an autonomous fruit picking machine, in “Autonomous Fruit Picking Machine: A Robotic Apple Harvester,” 6th International Conference on Field and Service Robotics—FSR 2007, Chamonix, France, 2007, which is incorporated herein by reference. Scarfe et al. describe a kiwifruit-picking robot, in “Development of an Autonomous Kiwifruit Picking Robot,” Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Autonomous Robots and Agents, February, 2009, which is incorporated herein by reference.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,765,780, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, describes a robot that maps a field to determine plant locations, number and size of fruit on plants and approximate positions of fruit on each plant, and can then plan and implement an efficient picking plan for itself or another robot. De-An et al. describe a robotic device consisting of a manipulator, end-effector and image-based vision servo control system for harvesting apples, in “Design and Control of an Apple Harvesting Robot,” Biosystems Engineering, volume 110, 2011, which is incorporated herein by reference.
A mass-removal approach for harvesting is proposed by Energid Technologies (Cambridge, Mass.) in “Robotic Mass Removal of Citrus Fruit,” April, 2012, which is incorporated herein by reference.